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Learn More. The Stories That Define Us. Meet IV From entrepreneurs to technologists and everyone in between, our people embody the power of innovation through collaboration and creative freedom. One of the ways Intellectual Ventures does that is by using outsiders to drum up ideas that the company can choose from and invest in.
In other words it outsources some of the grunt work of turning ideas into patents and other intellectual property. It has done that by creating a network of 3, inventors at universities, and more than companies and research institutions. But before Intellectual Ventures even taps that group, the company puts together a proposal called a "request for ideas" -- a play on the old request for proposal or RFP -- for what it wants.
This page document is the result of putting together one of the company's technologists, a business development specialist, and a lawyer together to try and find trends that are going on in any particular field. Londergan wouldn't share what one of these proposals looks like, and those who are a part of its network are sworn to secrecy. That includes how much they get if their idea is the one that gets picked, something Londergan says includes an up-front cash payment and royalties.
Gregory Phelan, managing partner at Seattle Polymers and an associate professor of chemistry at State University of New York, is one of those inventors. He and his company, which has five employees give or take, have been working with Intellectual Ventures for more than three years.
He won't talk about the financial terms of his work with Intellectual Ventures, but he says he's never been asked to take part in "troll" activity. In fact, he says Intellectual Ventures as a bodyguard of sorts, a big threat to companies that would happily step on his intellectual property. This is a small group," Phelan says, " And the temptation might be for someone to say, "Fine, we'll see you in court.
Intellectual Ventures as a protector of ideas rather than an exploiter of patent law? To Phelan, that's exactly what they are. The coolest bug zapper ever Drive a few zig-zagging miles through Bellevue's suburban sprawl and you come across a set of nondescript warehouses that house the labs of Intellectual Ventures. It's raining hard now, and Geoff Deane, vice president of engineering and the labs' chief, is handing out giant golf umbrellas to a small tour group walking between buildings.
Like the lobby of the main office, the artifacts of scientific quirkiness are proudly on display. Walk through the door at the labs' main facility you're greeted to a skeleton wearing safety goggles and a lab coat with the name "lab intern" on a metallic name badge.
Above its head is a well-known device the company designed -- one of its few public inventions -- which shoots mosquitos out of the air with lasers.
This is a place, the decor seems to imply, where invention is supposed to be fun. Someone else at the lab overhears Deane, and hustles across the room to the small, otherwise inconspicuous tube that blows air into a tank full of the blood suckers. Our attention is averted to a nearby TV screen that shows the "kills" in real time, though for safety's sake, the machine is currently using a murder-free green laser that simply targets them.
Inside the lab is just about every machine you could imagine, and many you may have never heard of. From microscopes, to 3D printers and a specialty saw that uses water to cut through inch-thick sheets of aluminum. There's even a climate-controlled room where the company raises mosquitos, something Deane says is surprisingly difficult. All this gear is here so that the company can move quickly when it wants to fast-track an idea, Deane says.
Along the way it has purchased up rooms full of equipment for that task -- some of it new, and some of it decades old. There's so much of it the lab is spread across three buildings, one of which houses a supercomputer with a five-figure monthly energy bill. There's even another storage facility where Intellectual Ventures stashes things it bought, but doesn't necessarily need yet, including a massive machine designed to bend airplane wings.
During our tour we're shown a very small handful of public-facing projects, including Cold Chain, a special insulated cooler that looks a lot like a big milk jug, which is designed to keep vaccines chilled for months at a time.
The Gates Foundation specifically asked Intellectual Ventures to build it. We also get a peek at the company's metamaterials project, which Deane says might just revolutionize the way information is sent around the planet.
Other stops include a look at the kitchen and photography studio where Myhrvold's "Modernist Cuisine" was researched and later photographed yes, it smells amazing , and rooms containing high-energy microscopes the company is using as part of a project to more quickly and cheaply identify malaria.
Short of that room full of mosquitos, it's easy to take all these good things and think of Intellectual Ventures as nothing short of a savior to humankind. But gadgets like vaccine chillers, high-tech satellite dishes, and laser-guided bug killers are not why Intellectual Ventures is disliked.
What it all comes back to is the scope and scale of the rest of the company's business. And did we mention privateers? Ahoy, a web of confusion Intellectual Ventures says it is involved in 10 patent lawsuits: Nine where it's taken companies ranging from Symantec to Wal-Mart to court and another where Xilinx has asked the court to invalidate Intellectual Ventures' patents ironic, since Xilinx is listed as an investor in Intellectual Ventures.
While that doesn't sound like much for a company with tens of thousands of patents, the Hastings law school researchers say that only tells part of the story. A privateer, you may recall from high school history, was a ship hired by, say, the British crown to attack Spanish merchant ships and steal their loot.
It was an easy way to engage in skirmishes on the high seas without actually going to war with Spain. Until recently, according to the Hastings researchers, Intellectual Ventures would sell a patent to another licensing company, and that company could if it wanted to head to court to enforce the patent. While it's hard to say for sure how often this occurs the researchers found several examples of patents they had identified as owned by Intellectual Venture shell companies that were, in turn, sold to other companies which, in turn, sued companies such as Samsung, Hewlett-Packard, Kodak, and CBS Radio which is owned by CNET's parent company, CBS.
In another example, Avistar Communications sold 41 patents and applications to Intellectual Ventures in , according to the Stanford researchers. In June , Intellectual ventures sold those patents to a company called Pragmatus, a small company that specializes in so-called patent monetization. Since then, Pragmatus has been busy. And in February , it filed a complaint with the International Trade Commission against nine other companies, including Samsung and Research in Motion.
Confused yet? Don't feel bad. It's an example of the opaque nature of Intellectual Ventures' business that triggers warning bells to so many in tech and the legal community.
But he did recently speak with Geekwire's Todd Bishop, a longtime Microsoft reporter in Seattle, about a new position he's creating at Intellectual Ventures, called the vice president of Global Good. The job, in a nutshell, is to find a way to take all that neat stuff in the lab into the real world, to find manufacturing partners and get it to the people who need them. Myhrvold was just as feisty with Bishop as he was with Walt Mossberg earlier in the year. No, he doesn't think the patent system is broken.
In fact, he rightly notes, it's just been reformed in the American Invents Act. Myhrvold also rightly notes that big companies aggressively enforce their patents and really, where is the outcry for patent reform because of the Apple vs. Samsung patent fight? And, lest you forget, Intellectual Ventures isn't just connecting you with your friends.
It's trying to help the poorest of the poor. Myhrvold testily responded to a question regarding skeptics:. Will Intellectual Ventures make money off these projects? But that's not his concern. Portfolio Exits 4. Year Founded. Investor Status. Actively Seeking New Investments.
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